Date:	Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:57:32 -0700
From:	Mingming <cmm@...ibm.com>
To:	Jiaying Zhang <jiayingz@...gle.com>
Cc:	ext4 development <linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...gle.com>,
	Michael Rubin <mrubin@...gle.com>,
	Manuel Benitez <rickyb@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: ext4 DIO read performance issue on SSD

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 12:48 -0700, Jiaying Zhang wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Mingming <cmm@...ibm.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-10-09 at 16:34 -0700, Jiaying Zhang wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> Recently, we are evaluating the ext4 performance on a high speed SSD.
> >> One problem we found is that ext4 performance doesn't scale well with
> >> multiple threads or multiple AIOs reading a single file with O_DIRECT.
> >> E.g., with 4k block size, multiple-thread DIO AIO random read on ext4
> >> can lose up to 50% throughput compared to the results we get via RAW IO.
> >>
> >> After some initial analysis, we think the ext4 performance problem is caused
> >> by the use of i_mutex lock during DIO read. I.e., during DIO read, we grab
> >> the i_mutex lock in __blockdev_direct_IO because ext4 uses the default
> >> DIO_LOCKING from the generic fs code. I did a quick test by calling
> >> blockdev_direct_IO_no_locking() in ext4_direct_IO() and I saw ext4 DIO read
> >> got 99% performance as raw IO.
> >>
> >
> > This is very interesting...and impressive number.
> >
> > I tried to change ext4 to call blockdev_direct_IO_no_locking() directly,
> > but then realize that we can't do this all the time, as ext4 support
> > ext3 non-extent based files, and uninitialized extent is not support on
> > ext3 format file.
> >
> >> As we understand, the reason why we want to take i_mutex lock during DIO
> >> read is to prevent it from accessing stale data that may be exposed by a
> >> simultaneous write. We saw that Mingming Cao has implemented a patch set
> >> with which when a get_block request comes from direct write, ext4 only
> >> allocates or splits an uninitialized extent. That uninitialized extent
> >> will be marked as initialized at the end_io callback.
> >
> > Though I need to clarify that with all the patches in mainline, we only
> > treat new allocated blocks form direct io write to holes, not to writes
> > to the end of file. I actually have proposed to treat the write to the
> > end of file also as unintialized extents, but there is some concerns
> > that this getting tricky with updating inode size when it is async IO
> > direct IO. So it didn't getting done yet.
> >
> >>  We are wondering
> >> whether we can extend this idea to buffer write as well. I.e., we always
> >> allocate an uninitialized extent first during any write and convert it
> >> as initialized at the time of end_io callback. This will eliminate the need
> >> to hold i_mutex lock during direct read because a DIO read should never get
> >> a block marked initialized before the block has been written with new data.
> >>
> >
> > Oh I don't think so. For buffered IO, the data is being copied to
> > buffer, direct IO read would first flush what's in page cache to disk,
> 
> Hmm, do you mean the filemap_write_and_wait_range() in
> __blockdev_direct_IO? 

yes, that's the one to flush the page cache before direct read.

> Or do we flush page cache after calling
> get_block in dio read?
> 
> Jiaying
> 
> > then read from disk. So if there is concurrent buffered write and direct
> > read, removing the i_mutex locks from the direct IO path should still
> > gurantee the right order, without having to treat buffered allocation
> > with uninitialized extent/end_io.
> >
> > The i_mutex lock, from my understanding, is there to protect direct IO
> > write to hole and concurrent direct IO read, we should able to remove
> > this lock for extent based ext4 file.
> >
> 
> 
> >> We haven't implemented anything yet because we want to ask here first to
> >> see whether this proposal makes sense to you.
> >>
> >
> > It does make sense to me.
> >
> > Mingming
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Jiaying
> >> --
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> >
> >
> >
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